A stunning, timeless story about race, friendship, what keeps us apart and what drives us apart, from the one and only Toni Morrison, with an introduction by Zadie Smith. Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old, when they were thrown together in a girls'' shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only to meet again later at a diner, a grocery store and then at a protest. Recitatif keeps Twyla''s and Roberta''s races ambiguous - we know that one is white and one is black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage? BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days.

Autorentext
Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time and The Fraud; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; four collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free, Intimations and Dead and Alive; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.